Online Video: How to Get Your Videos to Deliver

So you have taken a shot at online videos? Let’s presume that you are a small business owner who has set up a YouTube channel with dreams of going viral and having the untold masses roll into your store… and like most people you have discovered that it has done nothing but waste your time. We all know that video is an amazing tool for sales. According to Forrester Research, a video can increase conversion rates by 90% over traditional text ads.

The old adage, “build it and they will come” just doesn’t work online, and it doesn’t work with video. You need to have a different approach. If you were creating a piece of art, a short film, music video or a documentary then the video is a destination.

With Corporate Video Production, the video is a part of a wider journey. In other words, you need a specific, measurable and optimised video strategy for your website and any landing pages.

1) What are your business objectives?

What is it you want your online videos to achieve?

This is where is all starts. A video strategy does not sit separate from the rest of your business marketing plan, rather, it becomes a key part of that plan. I may be giving away trade secrets here but when approached by a client to create online videos, before I send over a creative brief or any ideas, I always ask three questions:

Who is the target audience? Demographics: who are they? Where do they live? What age are they? Even if you want to appeal to a broad audience, it is a wise idea to be as specific as possible in picking your target as this will shape the voice of the videos and also who it will fit into your strategy.

What action do you want them to take? This will tell you what the measurable objective of your videos are. It tells you where to use video, how long it should be, what style it should be, etc.

When the video has finished, how do you want the audience to feel? Video is an emotional medium, and although it is a great teacher with one minute of video being the equivalent of 1.8 billion words, video’s greatest strength is to help convey emotion. You can build trust between potential clients and your business. You can excite your audience about your new products. You can inspire them to become a part of something great. The emotional impact of video is outstanding. This question is arguably the most important for shaping the specs and style for the video.

2) Start building your online strategy.

Work with your video producer to build the video and sales journey simultaneously.

Often small business owners think of video as an after thought but including video at the beginning of your online strategy will provide you a much greater ROI. A good video producer is not just a filmmaker, they are also marketers who know what sort of video works in what scenario. Let’s say that you run an e-commerce site selling computer parts and you want to increase sales in the Sydney area. If you use video as an after thought, you may ask a video production company to create an ad for your homepage. You may spend upward of $600 and get a one minute video. This isn’t a bad idea, it’s just not going to help you greatly with your objective. Instead, why not ask your video producer to help you reach your business objective. If I were approached with this project, I would probably suggest that the first step would be to create a series of 30 second to one minute videos for each of your top-selling products and big-ticket items. Unlike an “about us” video, these videos would have multiple applications:

Embed the videos front and centre into the e-commerce site. I would recommend that you have a video button on any product list and a video embedded into any product page. This way, the emotional power of video is closest to the point of sale.

Have a section of the website, in the sidebar perhaps, that randomly pulls up one of your “featured” products with a photo of the product and a video button.

Host the videos on YouTube and embed the videos into a series of product review blogs. Schedule the blogs to be released once a week and automatically share this these blogs with your social media. This will improve your SEO in addition to helping you build an online following who will be interested to see your expert opinion.

These videos may cost you a little more but the return on investment is significantly more.

3) Know Your Audience

In online video, “Who is your target audience?” is a more powerful question they you may realise.

It is vital that know whom you’re trying to engage. Think about the needs of your audience. Visitors to your website will usually be at different stages of the product or brand journey. Use your audiences level of interest in the brand or product journey to help segment your data: 1) low – the “just browsing” crowd who are new to your brand or product category; 2) interested – they’re evaluating you; and 3) returning customers – already familiar with your brand and with some loyalty to it.

4) Measure Everything.

Like everything else online you want to capture the analytics for your videos otherwise you can’t gauge you ROI.

There are different ways of collecting how your video performs but one of my favourites it by using Google Analytics event tracking. This way the performance of a video can be directly linked to the conversion on those business goals we were talking about earlier.

Please comment…

Do you need any more information on any of the above point? Is there anything I have left out?

Next you want to build your online strategy with this goal in mind. Just hosting the blog on YouTube won’t cut it. Rather, create a video blog template in your CMS or website that has your blog at the top and related service offering underneath.

By knowing your audience you know what to blog about, the style of video blog and how long it should be.

Finally, measure everything! Set up event tracking on your video and you can see how many people watched the video vs conversions from that viewer. Also, importantly, you can measure video behaviour. If people are only watching 3 seconds and then stopping, you know your intro is not getting people hooked. If they are constantly watching the whole video, but then bouncing, you need to change the end of the video to leave them wanting more.

Thanks for this awesome blog Craig. I am considering embarking on the video journey and I totally agree on what you have said above.
I am a fellow Central Coastie so who knows, we may even end up working together one day!

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